You don’t need zoning to be exclusionary: Manufactured home parks, land-use regulations and housing segregation in the Houston metropolitan area

Abstract

Manufactured home parks (MHPs), businesses that are “designed, developed, operated and maintained.for the placement and occupancy of manufactured homes on a long-term basis,” are an important source of affordable housing in the United States and other countries11Law Insider, “manufactured home park” definition. https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/manufactured-home-park. The social and spatial stigma surrounding MHPs has been widely documented, and the location of these communities is a key feature of their marginalization. We examine the how land use regulations contribute to the spatial distribution and segregation of MHPs in Greater Houston, a fast-growing urban region in the southern United States. At the local-government scale, we collect land-use regulations from the 134 jurisdictions in the Houston MSA to analyze how jurisdictions shape development, expansion, or improvement of MHPs within their boundaries, and how the regulation of MHPs varies across jurisdictions. At the scale of the individual MHPs, we draw a random proportionate sample of 400 MHPs and collect data from primary and secondary sources including tax parcel records, local zoning maps, remotely sensed imagery, and a proprietary real estate dataset. We discuss four key findings. First, local governments use a variety of land-use tools, not just zoning, to exclude, limit, or condition the placement of MHPs within their respective jurisdictions. Second, we show that these land-use regulations have widely varying requirements for the (re)development of MHPs. Third, we find that a significant number of MHPs are already located in unincorporated areas and that new MHPs will be less likely to be in incorporated areas. Finally, we find that local governments often treat MHPs as something other than housing, which introduces important uncertainties about the future of MHPs.